After a long hiatus (over 3 years!), I'm finally returning to give this project some love. At the end of the day, this is just a hobby, and it has to move aside when real life issues require more of my time. Although I can't promise that won't happen again in the future, circumstances have changed, and I do find myself with the time to work on this project again. At this stage I believe this will continue to be the case, and I'll be able to consistently move this emulator forward.
I'm keeping things low key for now, but I'll be putting out a new release very soon, possibly in less than 24 hours. This release will include performance and usability enhancements, a few new features, and various assorted bugfixes. This is mainly a housekeeping release, to clear the decks for bigger work to come.
I've been pondering what I should be focusing on for new development over the last few days, and I feel to stay true to the goals of this project, that has to be accuracy. Although there are a lot of new cool features and enhancements I want to build, Exodus currently falls well short of where it should be in terms of accuracy, and this is primarily down to a lack of sub-opcode level external bus timing accuracy in the 68000 core. While no other Mega Drive emulator does this correctly either, they bend the timings of other system events to work around this limitation and make mainstream games run. I have deliberately avoided doing that in Exodus, and as a result there are numerous games I know of that don't function correctly as a result. This is where I'll be focusing the next development stages, aiming to get 100% cycle accurate M68000 and VDP interaction as a priority. You need to be able to measure accuracy though, so this process will involve hardware testing, and producing test ROMs. By the end of this process, I'll deliver some ROMs which can act as a regression test and a measuring stick, to compare timing accuracy between emulators and the real hardware. I already know roughly how it's going to work, and it's going to be pretty well impossible to bodge, so it'll be interesting to see the results. If you thought OverDrive 2 was brutal on emulators, just wait for this one.....
I'm pretty happy with the release of Exodus 2.0 overall, but as expected with only me testing the build prior to release, there were a few bugs in some areas I hadn't tested for awhile. There have been enough issues fixed to justify a patch release, so Exodus 2.0.1 is now available for download! Considering it was 2 years between the first two releases, I think 18 hours between these last two is a bit of an improvement. :)
Enhancements:
Bug fixes:
Exodus 2.0 has now been released! You can download the new version now on the current releases page. I'm dedicating this release to my beautiful wife Judi, and my two boisterous little boys Justin and Aiden.
As promised, Exodus is now also open source. Check out the Source Code section for instructions on how to obtain and compile the source, and information on how you can contribute code changes to the project.
Good news, everyone! Although my previous plans to release Exodus 1.1 last year were shelved, due to a lack of time to work on the project for much of last year, things are back on track now though, and a shiny brand new 2.0 version of Exodus will now be released 30th of April 2015, exactly 2 years after the first release. This release will contain major user interface and performance improvements, as well as a lot of back-end work on the plugin model. Most importantly, I'm now ready to take the project open source. At the same time as the release, the source repository for Exodus will go live on Bitbucket.
So I've been pretty silent on this website since the first release of Exodus. Some family trouble came up mid last year, and with a newborn and 2 year old child on top of that, there wasn't a lot of time for me to work on this project for much of the year. I've been doing heavy development for several months now though, working towards the next release. The biggest part of what's coming in the next release isn't feature improvements though, it's the promised open sourcing of this project. A project like this is too big for one person to do alone, and I'm very open to anyone who wants to contribute to move this project forward, be it with new emulation cores, debug features, or bug fixes, all of it helps to improve Exodus and build it up. My main focus since the last release has been on making some critical internal source code changes I felt were required to complete, before other people start writing code on top of this platform.
If you wish to make a donation to show your appreciation for this project, you can do so here. Your donation may go towards the hosting costs of the website, or equipment or reference hardware to assist in the development of Exodus. It may also go towards a bunch of flowers for my beautiful wife, to say thanks for your support and patience all those nights I stayed up late working on this project.